The In-Between
by BeneaththeWords
Summary: With the group laying low in Sandy Shores, Sage and Michael have a heart to heart following a rough decision that has come with its fair share of emotional consequences for Sage.


**AN: This is just another oneshot I've written that involves my gtav oc and her relationship towards Michael. While my friends and I do have a main story with a linear plot line and closely related chapters in the works, I just wanted to share some of the single pieces I've been working on for practice and inspiration. Regardless, feedback is most definitely welcome and your thoughts on our ocs as well as how I write the game's characters is very appreciated!**

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There was a stillness in the air that night. A stillness that brought both comfort and unease to Sage as she sat along the bank of the river with her knees drawn to her chest. It wasn't quite dark yet and she could see the edge of the sun peering just behind the mountain she was facing; the last of its rays ribboning throughout every ripple of water below her. The world around her held a purple hue and every move she made sent a wave of dust flying around her.

The stillness wasn't in the movement around her, but in the dead silence Sandy Shores seemed to have in that moment. In all her times of visiting that unorthodox town, Sage had never witnessed it to be so peaceful. On a typical night there would be hooting and hollering and loud motorbikes galore - even music could be heard everywhere you stepped if not the shrill cries of coyotes. But that night, the only noise Sage heard was that of someone's shoes stepping over the gravel behind her, snapping her out of whatever reverie she had lost herself in. It had been a hell of a week, and Sage needed time to process all that had happened.

She didn't have to look up to know that it was Michael and she didn't have to look over at him as he sat down next to her to know he was still wearing that damned suit. She could've sworn he lived in that thing. Sage, on the other hand, opted for shorts and an oversized hoodie. Something about Sandy Shores made her want to curl up inside and sleep forever, and she planned to do just that the following day with the time Lester granted them to lay low for a while.

"How're you holding up?" Michael asked, cutting a little bit away at the silence. He handed her a beer.

Sage just shrugged, not exactly sure how to answer that. She was okay she supposed, at least physically. Her bruises and scratches would heal and her exhaustion would fade in the coming days when she could catch up on some rest. Internally, though, Sage had no idea. She had a mess of thoughts continuously running through her mind, flashing back to the pivotal moment when she fired the gun and took someone's life away in an instant. It was never something Sage wanted to experience, never anything she'd thought she'd have to do herself, and she was struck at just how fast it had happened. How something so definite and impacting could be over within a split second. Sage couldn't wrap her head around it.

"What you did wasn't wrong, Sage." He told her, hoping he wouldn't say the wrong thing.

She looked at him in disbelief. "Well it didn't feel right, either, Michael." Sage's voice wavered on the edge of anger and guilt.

She started to stand but Michael grabbed her by the arm instead. "Stay, Sage-" He said hastily. "I shouldn't have said anything."

She allowed him to pull her back down to where she sat, but this time she lay down on her back so that she could see the sky above her. The stars were beginning to appear and she could see the contrails making patterns all throughout the sky.

"You know the first time I shot a gun at somebo-" Michael started again, but Sage cut him off.

"I thought we were done talking about this." She let out a heavy sigh.

"No, just hear me out - _for once_."

Sage rolled her eyes at that but didn't make any indication that she was going to say anything else so he continued.

"I was nineteen years old. Me and some "old pals" you could call 'em, we had just landed one of our first big scores." Sage was still on her back but she turned her head to look at him as he spoke. "This high end mansion we had found when we made our way to North Yankton. We thought we'd hit a gold mine. We practically did."

Michael paused for a moment and took a swig of his beer.

"It belonged to some old-timer that had his entire family killed off so he could inherit such a sum." Michael let out of a laugh.

"Jesus Christ." Sage breathed.

"Yeah, well, it didn't make any bit of sense. Still doesn't! The man was on his last leg, he wouldn't make but a couple more years more on this earth." Michael shook his head.

"Did you shoot him?" Sage asked, feeling as though she already knew the answer.

"Nah, didn't have to."

"What do you mean?" Sage had propped herself up on her elbows by now and was looking up at him intently.

"We had it all planned, right, we knew where he kept all of his money, where he'd have gone during the day, all the important shit. We were new to the business -" Sage shook her head at that. "But we still knew how to get a job done."

"So, what's the deal?"

"Well, it was right before we met Lester so we didn't really have the ability to do it the clean way we do today."

"Clean." Sage let the word roll off her tongue. It tasted sour.

"Look, we did it the best way we knew how. We were a couple of punks back then, shit I still am." Michael bumped her shoulder with his arm and took another sip of his drink. Sage hadn't taken a single sip of hers yet.

"The place wasn't exactly covered in security cameras, but the house had them at the major entrances. So what did our dumbasses do?" Michael paused. "We wait for the bastard to go on one of his excursions to the casino. Why the son of a bitch wanted to gamble at 8:00 in the morning was beyond me."

Sage laughed. "Is there a point to this story?"

"'Course there is, just listen, will ya?" Michael gave her a look and Sage just shrugged in return. "Anyways, we make our way through one of the side windows. We found out a few days prior that he leaves it open all throughout the day and only ever remembers to close it at night. So we climb in, right, all stealthy and shit, and what we find?"

"Oh, please do tell." Sage drawled, turning to lean on her side.

"The place had already been ransacked!"

Sage looked up at him from where she lay, her finger drawing shapes into the sand. "You're kidding."

"Wish I was." Michael sighed.

"Talk about unlucky timing."

"No kidding. I mean, we get in there and you would've thought a tornado had swept through. The whole place was as if it had been turned upside down." Michael thought for a moment. "It was so strange, nothing was even stolen, all of it was just - just destroyed."

"Bastard have a lot of enemies?" Sage asked.

Michael rolled his head to the side. "Must've. This sure as hell wasn't a robbery. I found that out sooner than later."

Sage rose an eyebrow.

"The person who did that, he hadn't even left yet."

Sage looked him dead in the eyes. "He's the man you shot."

Michael stared back at her for a moment before slowly nodding. "He shot first, I'll give you that. Shit, he shot one of mine. We didn't even make it two steps into the kitchen before we heard a gun go off. Next thing I knew, my buddy Anthony was on the ground, bleeding from the head behind me."

"Fuck." Sage whispered.

"I didn't hesitate to put a bullet right back into that man. I shot him dead in the chest." Michael licked his lips, his gaze shifting to the water in front of them. "I had never felt worse about anything else in my entire life."

This came as a shock to Sage. She knew Michael wasn't a cruel person, messed up and always making the wrong decisions, but she knew he wasn't genuinely cruel. Yet she still didn't think such a thing would have ever fazed him. She sure didn't think it would tear at him the way it was to her in that moment.

"I did get over it pretty quickly, though. I had to if I wanted to survive in that business. And I did, barely yeah, but I did."

Sage's voice was hardly a pathetic rasp and she could feel tears threatening to brim her eyelids, "I don't know if this is something I can get over, Michael."

"If you come to terms with it, you can."

"Come to terms with it?" Sage asked, incredulously. "Michael, there isn't anything to come to terms with." Sage had sat up straight by now. "I shot a man, okay. I ended his _life_. Without so much as a thought to what I was doing, I just shot him. That wasn't right."

Michael looked at her, his voice low. "You had no other choice, Sage. He was going to shoot Aubrey. If she died, would that have been right?"

Sage said nothing.

"Look, Sage," He grabbed onto her hand, but she yanked it out of his immediately and he hesitated. "Sometimes we have to make decisions that aren't easy. Sometimes we don't get to choose what is right or wrong, sometimes we just have to _do it_. Now I know that you aren't used to that -"

"What the fuck do you know about me, Michael? You have no idea the kinds of decisions I've had to make." Sage was seething.

"Then why the fuck is this bothering you so much, huh? Why the fuck is this eating you whole?" Michael nearly yelled that, severing the night's precious silence with a knife.

"You know, I was really hoping you _would_ understand." Sage's voice wavered mid-sentence and she could have kicked herself for it.

Michael took a deep breath and his expression softened. "Then help me to understand, Sage. I want to help you, I do, but you have to be willing to accept it."

"I just don't want to become a bad person."

"I know bad men, I am a bad man-"

"You aren't, Michael."

"No, I am, I know it. But I also know that you _aren't_. You're one of the furthest things from it, that much I can tell you."

Tears were freely streaming down Sage's face by now. That was the first time Michael had ever seen Sage so openly cry. "Then why does it feel like everything I'm doing is wrong? Whether I'm in this kind of business or not, I'm still so corrupt! There's no in-between, Michael. Why can't I just find the damn in-between?." Sage's head was in her hands now.

Michael was hesitant, but eventually settled on putting his arm around her shoulders as Sage spilled out all of her despair into her palms. After a while she lifted her head, and leaned just slightly into Michael. She laughed.

"To think Lester thought sending us here would be good. All I can do here is listen to my own thoughts."

"You know, maybe that wouldn't be so bad." Michael replied. "Maybe the more you get acquainted with them, the easier it'll be to live with them."

"Since when were you this philosophical?" Sage cracked a tiny smile.

"Hey, I have my moments." A silence settled between them for a few minutes, and they both were comfortable just watching the sun disappear completely.

"You know, I used to want to be a filmmaker." Michael said after some time.

"I can see that." Sage replied.

"Glad to hear it." He gave her a lopsided smile.

"What kind of movies did you want to make?"

"One of the classics," Michael put his hand in front of him as if he were revealing something spectacular. "You know, the ones with all the action and drama packed into them. The ones with the good guys and bad guys."

"Life seems to be so easy in those kinds of movies. There never really is any sort of guessing. It's all so straightforward."

"Yeah, I think so, too." Michael agreed.

Sage turned her heads upwards towards the sky and watched as a few of the stars winked at her from above. "You know, it's strange."

"What's that?" Michael asked.

"How rarely any of us ever notices the stars. I mean, _really_ notices them." Sage's eyes darted back and forth across the sky, her expression unreadable.

"So? They're just stars." Michael squinted his eyes as he followed her line of sight.

Sage's head snapped back towards Michael. "But that's just it. They are _just_ stars. And we're _just_ people _._ "

Michael gave her an uncertain look and shook his head slowly. "I don't think I get what you mean."

"When I was a kid, I really didn't care what I was when I grew up. I didn't care if I had the worst job in the world if it meant I was making enough money. But as I got older, I began to want more out life. I wanted to actually matter, and not for how much money I was making or for how smart I was, I just wanted to matter because I was alive and here."

It was evident that Michael still wasn't quite sure where this was going, but he kept silent as she spoke.

"Y'know, when I was growing up, I used to sit outside and watch the stars and I was so painfully jealous of them, Michael, it was so stupid." Sage let out a humorless laugh. "I was so jealous because people didn't care that they seemingly served no purpose, hell they didn't care that those stars we're looking at right now are already dead. We just cherished them because they were beautiful and they were simply there. That's the only reason."

"But we aren't stars, Sage."

"Do you know how long it took me to figure that out?" Sage asked, although it wasn't a question she intended to have answered. "But now I look at them, and I'm starting to think we're not so different after all. We don't _really_ cherish them. Not in the way I thought we would anyways. The way I thought we would cherish us."

"Sage, what are you trying to get at?"

"I'm trying to get that I just wanted to be seen for once without anything else attached. I just want to be seen because I am a part of this world, not because I can offer something to it. I want to matter because I was put here for a reason, not because of that reason."

"Oh, Sage -"

"Now I get it. They're just stars and they don't matter either. Not really, not genuinely." Sage's voice dripped with a bitterness she resented.

"Sage," The way Michael said her name sent shivers down her spine and made her look at him straight in the eyes. It was as if he were saying her name for the first time.

Slowly, Michael's hand moved from her shoulder to her cheek. He didn't stroke it, he just cupped it in the palm of his left hand and looked at her. Softly he spoke next the words that made Sage feel at peace for the first time in as long as she could remember:

"To me, you do just matter."


End file.
